What looks like a scatter of low, grassy mounds turns out to be the remains of at least six houses arranged around a dividing field wall, with a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement, running somewhere beneath. The sod has claimed most of it, including one rectangular hut whose foundations measure roughly 7.6 metres by 3.5 metres, their outlines still legible but softened by centuries of growth.

The site at Cool preserves an unusual layering of occupation. A north-to-south field wall cuts through the cluster, and the houses to its west appear older than the two on its eastern side, suggesting the settlement shifted or expanded over time rather than appearing all at once. Adding another layer still, the foundations of a nineteenth-century house sit on the northern edge of the group, tied to a field system that itself overlies an earlier one. This kind of palimpsest, where one era of farming and habitation is physically pressed down onto another, is not uncommon in the west of Ireland, but it is rarely so compact or so close to open air and cliff-edge as it is here. The work of archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, brought the site into the documented record, though the ground had been holding its own account for considerably longer.